Despite increased awareness of the urgency to respond to climate change and the need for more sustainable practices at the University of Illinois, advancing campus sustainability initiatives remains challenging. The decentralized organizational structure of the university, fiscal constraints, and the plurality of attitudes, goals and priorities among campus stakeholders enhance the complexity of identifying and implementing sustainable solutions. At the same time, there are abundant opportunities to make progress toward achieving the goals laid out in the Illinois Climate Action Plan. In this presentation, I illustrate these issues in the context of a recent initiative to reduce single-use plastic consumption on campus. Through this lens, I aim to provide critical insights into how to catalyze, intensify, and accelerate actions that will improve campus sustainability.
